Light-field imaging is the capture of four-dimensional light-field data that provides not only spatial information regarding light received from a scene, but also angular information indicative of the angle of incidence of light received from the scene by the camera's optical elements. Such four-dimensional information may be used to reconstruct a variety of two-dimensional images, including images at various focus depths, relative to the camera. More precisely, a plurality of sub-aperture images may be projected from a light-field. Each of these two-dimensional sub-aperture images can be considered a two-dimensional slice of the four-dimensional information. In a plenoptic light-field camera, a microlens array is used to capture an array of smaller images, each of which pertains to one of the microlenses. Each sub-aperture image is the image captured by combining pixels at the same location in each of the smaller images.
Unfortunately, known systems and methods lack the ability to easily generate four-dimensional light-field data from image data that does not include light-field data, or from image data that includes sparse light-field data.